Category: Agatha Lively

Chapter 3.

It’s a strange feeling, being confronted with a man that you know is a deadly, dangerous killer, and not doing a damned thing about it. Especially when you’re a cop.

But then again, it looks like Richard B. Riddick is here to help us.

Life gets very strange at times.

With PreCrime closed, I’ve gone back to being a normal police detective. I’m not a police chief anymore, and I prefer it that way. Most of what I did as the chief of PreCrime was detective work, sifting through the clues that Agatha and the Twins sent us to find the patterns among them. That’s what I’m best at. Most chiefs don’t get to do anything like that.

Anyway, I had to take a year off to get completely clean, as part of a deal to have a job to come back to at all. I’m lucky that I’ve done enough genuine detective work, and made enough friends in the Force, that they even wanted me to come back. Given that Lamar tried to frame me for Danny Witwer’s murder in my home, though, the whole crime scene was declared contaminated, so none of the neuroin they’d found there would have been admissible evidence, even just in an internal review. I got lucky, and was able to get back a job I genuinely love.

As a homicide detective, I’ve studied the patterns of as many of the most dangerous killers in the Colonies as I can. Including the kills of the officially-dead Riddick.

So I know he’s not behind the murders we’re dealing with now. I’d know that even if I didn’t know—now—where he’s been ever since he supposedly died in the Hunter-Gratzner crash. It’s not his pattern. He doesn’t kill women or kids if he can help it. And he sure as hell never rapes or tortures his victims. Most people think he was a spree killer or someone who just went crazy one day. Most people haven’t seen the real files about him.

Our new killer got named the Baltimore Ripper by the press two weeks ago. Last week, I was asked to join the investigative team. Three days ago, I got word that John Ezekiel, sheriff of a one-stoplight planet called Berenda, had profiled our killer during his run there and had followed him to Earth. I picked “Zeke” up from the spaceport two days ago.

Only John Ezekiel must have died in the Hunter-Gratzner crash instead of Riddick. Which also means that Agatha survived the crash in the company of a killer. She has to have known.

There’s no way she wouldn’t have known.

The twist is, the man’s a genuine detective, himself. His investigative notes are top rate. His profile on our “Ripper” is better than the one the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit came up with. He figured out how the Ripper picks out his targets and how he gets them alone. Last night we almost caught the bastard because of Riddick’s analysis.

Which, according to Riddick—I really need to think of him as “Ezekiel” before I screw things up by saying that name out loud—means that our “Ripper” is going to start over in another city now. He bolted from Berenda just before… Sheriff Ezekiel… could trap him.

I don’t think the “Ripper” would have seen the inside of a courtroom, though, if he’d been trapped there.

I think Riddick—Ezekiel, dammit—is here to kill him, not catch him.

And if I’m right, I also don’t think I’m going to try to stop him.

If PreCrime were still in play, we wouldn’t have a ball for that. Not yet, maybe not ever. That’s the thing about Riddick’s kills. The thing that makes him unique. His murders have never been crimes of passion. He’d never generate a red ball. But they’ve also never been premeditated. Not in the usual sense.

When I was hounded by PreCrime almost three years ago, before it was closed down, I was in a similar position. The crime I was supposedly going to commit was one that had been orchestrated by someone else. All the premeditation went on in Lamar Burgess’s head. I was manipulated into place, maneuvered by my own attempts to solve the mystery and prevent the crime. Lamar knew exactly how to make sure I followed the breadcrumbs to the murder he’d arranged. Agatha was the one who tried to help me break free. She told me I could choose.

Until then, I’d believed in the system. I’d believed in what we were doing, how we were doing it. Until Agatha began talking to me.

“Can you see,” she asked me. She wanted me to see the flaw in the system, the lie that it was based in. The lie that had cost her mother her life. “I’m tired of the future,” she said. That was when I knew that the cruelest and most inhumane prison in our system was the Temple itself. And… “you still have a choice. You can choose.”

That was when I knew, for certain, that justice wasn’t being served. That the metaphysics were nowhere near as certain as we’d believed. That we were convicting on a possible future, not a certain one.

That any of the “killers” we had incarcerated might have chosen not to kill their intended victim.

Because I didn’t kill mine. I didn’t pull the trigger. Leo Crow pulled it for me.

That’s not how it went with Riddick, exactly. He started out as a soldier. Pulled off the streets after a life of petty juvenile crime and offered a chance to begin again in the military. Soon after he started boot camp, they knew they had someone special.

His Appleseed AQT score on day one was 250. He never missed a shot no matter what kind of gun they handed him. His reaction time score averaged 105 milliseconds. His Dynamic Leap and Balance Test scores were astonishing. Seventeen years old, and all he needed was a little guidance to become the perfect killing machine.

The most interesting part was how calm and clinical he was about all of it. It raised fears, briefly, that they might have a sociopath on their hands—not, apparently, that that would have disqualified him from service—but his empathy scores were just fine.

It did, however, mean that when he killed, he always killed quickly. His targets generally died within five seconds. Most died within one. That was how his empathy handled his profession. He didn’t let his targets suffer.

Which is why I know he isn’t behind the Ripper’s murders. And why I know that what is driving his pursuit, right now, is just how long Penny Hathaway suffered before the Ripper finally killed her.

Riddick’s weak­ness… and his strength… is children.

He’s only ever once killed children once in his career, and it was the incident that turned him from an elite member of the military to one of the most wanted men in the galaxy.

And… initially… it wasn’t even his crime.

He and his unit were among almost a thousand troops dispatched to deal with a clash between two groups of colonists who were trying to expand into the same territory. They were supposed to preserve a cease-fire, keep the peace. Something went wrong. Someone high up got bought.

Hospitals are supposed to be off-limits for strikes. A children’s hospital? Absolutely off-limits. A biological weapon aimed at a children’s hospital? A capital war crime.

Whoever shot it off didn’t live very long past that, of course. But they never had their day in court, either.

Riddick and his platoon had been inoculated against that particular virus, and he knew it. Nobody in the hospital was immune. Not the doctors, the nurses, the administrators, or the two hundred patients under the age of twelve. Their deaths would have been horrifying. For anyone who hadn’t received the inoculation, there was no cure. Everyone in the place was doomed to spend days dying horribly.

Until a twenty-three-year-old elite Marine Raider walked into the building and put everyone down. Instead of days, each of them died in seconds, most never even knowing they were about to die. As far as I know, it’s the most soul-crushing act of mercy that anyone has ever committed.

Nobody would have charged him with anything for that. Not ever. That’s not why he ended up on every wanted list.

He found out who launched the missile. He found out who authorized it. He found out who paid them. Nasty stuff. All of it came out a few years later, mostly because it no longer mattered; there was no one left to either try to protect or prosecute. Except their executioner.

Five hundred of Riddick’s fellow marines died before he was done. Some of them may, in fact, have even been innocent. I don’t believe he cared at that point. Not after having to look two hundred kids in the eye and put out their lights forever.

For a while after that, the only kills attributed to him were officers—both military police and civilian law enforcement—and mercenaries who tried to bring him in. But a man on the run needs a job. He didn’t become a killer-for-hire, but he was willing to sell his other skills. Infiltration, burglary, reconnaissance, espionage. And if someone got in the way while he was on one of those jobs—as long as it wasn’t a kid—they died. In five seconds or less.

It was never premeditated. It was never a crime of passion. He always tried in his own way to be kind, as kind as he could be, to his victims. They died fast. And, as Agatha once told me, if we have any choice about it, that’s how we should all go.

I don’t know how he managed it, exactly, but he was able to not merely break his trail and fake his death, but take on a new identity. His retina scans are an exact match for John Ezekiel, which shouldn’t be possible, especially since I know Riddick was incarcerated long enough that he had a “shine job” done on his eyes. Those things are irreversible. But he has the training to make the impossible happen. Maybe I’ll even find out how at some point. But when I picked him up and brought him to town, every ad we passed was keyed to John Ezekiel. “Welcome back to the Sashimi Emporium, Zeke! Would you like your usual?”

I was standing next to a man I know for a fact has taken hundreds of lives, and all I was thinking about was how to coax out of him just how he can fool the Eye-dents.

Of course, if I ask, I’ll blow the game wide open.

Right now, I just have to trust that, if Riddick were any kind of a threat to either law enforcement or the general population, Agatha would have warned us already. That whatever connection she feels to him wouldn’t supersede her responsibility to everyone else’s safety.

Wally is traveling with us. He hasn’t seen the Precogs in almost three years, and I don’t think he’s really known what to do with himself since they left D.C. Right now he’s talking R—Ezekiel’s ear off about Agatha. I don’t think anybody’s clued him in that “Zeke” knew her first.

“She was always the strongest of the three, even before she disappeared for two years,” he’s saying. “But when she came back, she was off the charts. Her visions, on their own, were strong enough to run with, but we needed a system where they were corroborated, so the twins stayed on. They couldn’t see clearly without her, but the reverse wasn’t true. She kept them with her, though, when they all left.”

“Is that why we’re consulting her,” our visiting Sheriff asks, “instead of them?”

“They might still be in,” Wally says. “but when she took Anderton’s call the other day, she said something about how she might come back to town to help.”

They both glance over in my direction. I nod and shrug. That was what she said, along with something about the Twins possibly going on a camping excursion. It didn’t sound like they wanted in.

Wally was chosen for the Precrime program for two specific reasons. First, he absolutely adored the Precogs from the moment he met them and was devoted to their care, and he was never even a little creepy about it even though much of that care could be pretty intimate. Second, and more important, he is one of the rare human beings who is a complete metaphysical null. Which means that nothing he thought could bias their visions at all. How the hell anyone figured that out about him, I don’t know, except that whenever anyone else would enter the Temple, all three Precogs would begin to have random visions while they were in the room, which would only stop when they left. Wally’s presence in the room never triggered those or interfered with the validity of their work. Maybe part of the interview process was just to send candidates into the Temple and see what the Precogs started visualizing.

Since then, he’s apparently been working as a caregiver to coma patients. Not too terribly different from having to handle all of the hygiene and motor stimulus for three Precogs who were being kept heavily sedated at all times. I wonder if he has one-way conversations with them, the way he did with Agatha and the Twins. Fletch told me that, when they put Agatha back in the Bath after they arrested me, he acted like she was happy about her return.

I know better. She hated the Bath.

Everybody out there thought that she and her “brothers” lived in luxury. I was party to that lie. I tried not to think of them as human. It’s one of the things I like least about myself now. Even the neuroin addiction seems more morally upstanding than that.

It’s funny how being confronted by the presence of—the existence of—someone like Riddick turns over the morality log and makes you look at what’s beneath it, the relative weight of each transgression you’ve engaged in. Especially given that he’s shown up with the intention of stopping a serial killer like the Baltimore Ripper, putting him on the side of the angels.

The angel of death, anyway.

He’s here to put down the man who tortured Penny Hathaway to death. I don’t think he’ll hesitate the way I did with Leo Crow when I thought he’d murdered Sean. But then, of the two of us, Riddick is probably the better profiler. He knows what the Ripper is, what he does, why he does it. I had no idea who or what Leo Crow was until I met him, and maybe I hesitated because my instincts told me he couldn’t be the man who took my son from me.

That man, whoever he is or was, has never been found. And I find myself wanting to talk to Riddick about that. Damn it. I need to think of him as John Ezekiel. I want to talk to him, though, ask him how he would find my son’s abductor, maybe let him look over the evidence. He sees into the darkness in a way none of the rest of us can.

The next few days or weeks, sitting on this secret while we chase after the Ripper, are going to be murder.

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Posted on the 25^th anniversary of the theatrical release of Pitch Black, February 18, 2025.